David Snoke reviews Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt for The Christian Scientific Society:
Like Signature in the Cell, it comes after 10-20 years of debate on intelligent design. Thus Meyer can summarize the back and forth of the debate in a nice story-like approach. The story is not one of gaps in our knowledge constantly being filled, but the paradox of the Cambrian becoming sharper and sharper. Again, when evolutionists talk to each other instead of to the public, they are remarkably candid about this, and Meyer well documents this with many quotes.
A huge difficulty for Darwin’s defenders is the difference between “order” and “information.”
One section I was quite happy about was the section on “self-organization,” promoted by Kaufmann, Prigogene, and others…. Essentially, getting “order” from natural self-organizing process and getting “information” are two totally different things. “Order” is easy — all you need is a natural length scale to arise in a system and “spontaneous symmetry breaking” will lead to orderly patterns on this length scale. This is true of atomic crystals at low temperature and rows of clouds in the sky.
But the very nature of information, whether in DNA or human writing, precludes natural forces from generating it. DNA can hold information precisely because there is no natural force demanding the nucleic acids be in one location or another. All information requires this type of “contingency,” that is, openness to many possible choices; a system which is driven to one required state holds no information.”
It is fair to say that most devout Darwin defenders, whether Internet trolls or accomplished biology teachers, do not recognize the significance of this problem. They end up invoking “natural selection acting on random mutation” as a form of magic instead.
See also Steve Meyer’s new book, Darwin’s Doubt is overwhelmed with trolls … and customers … at Amazon
Historian who follows ID: Significance of Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt exceeds that of Darwin’s Black Box
Hat tip: Pearcey Report